It's happened. The US Supreme Court has struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as unconstitutional. I saw these wordson SCOTUS blog and was profoundly moved: "DOMA is unconstitutional as a deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth Amendment."

If you have never paid attention during the reading of a judicial ruling that declared you to have no such broad liberty as defined in America's founding documents, you may not understand the emotion. For decades, LGBT Americans wanting legal equality have heard: "the state has a compelling interest" … "society has an interest" … everyone, it seemed, had some grand interest in blocking us from a host of rights, especially civil marriage. But no one was looking out for our interests, as Americans with full integrity under the law, because for decades no one would allow that we had such integrity. The very idea was an affront.

Wednesday, those old arguments fell, at least insofar as the federal government is concerned. The highest court in my country has held that I enjoy an equal liberty of persons, one that is protected by the Fifth Amendment.

Court arguments against LGBT rights in general have long felt like a kind of legalistic gaslighting: You are a U.S. citizen; of course you enjoy fundamental constitutional rights. But you can't enforce those rights against anyone else's discriminatory actions, because you don't quite have those kinds of rights, and the state has a compelling interest in not granting you that type of consideration. The legal circles went round and round in mind-numbing and dispiriting rings.

Today, the Court said equal is as equal does. The federal government shall recognize the lawfully married same-sex couples of the United States as just that. After decades of being finessed out of the Constitution, the DOMA decision affirmsthat our great American experiment will not perish in a state of torpor, but will live, evolve and thrive.

Kim Painter serves as recorder in Johnson County, Iowa. In 1998, she became the first openly gay first-time candidate elected to office in Iowa. This year she was named a Harvey Milk Champion of Change by President Obama.

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